Short answers, pulled from the story.
De architectura, also published as Ten Books on Architecture, is a treatise on architecture written by the Roman architect and military engineer Vitruvius and dedicated to the emperor Caesar Augustus. It is the only treatise on architecture to survive from antiquity, and has been regarded since the Renaissance as the first known book on architectural theory.
De architectura was probably written between 30 and 20 BC. It combines the knowledge and views of many ancient Greek and Roman writers on architecture, the arts, natural history, and building technology.
The Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini rediscovered De architectura in 1416, finding a copy in the abbey library of Saint Gall in Switzerland. He publicized the manuscript to a receptive audience of Renaissance thinkers at a time when interest in classical heritage was reviving.
Vitruvius outlined three conditions for good architecture: utility, strength, and beauty, referred to in Latin as utilitas, firmitas, and venustas. The best-known English rendering, from Sir Henry Wotton's 1624 translation, reads: "Well building hath three conditions: firmness, commodity, and delight."
Leonardo da Vinci based his famous drawing the Vitruvian Man on principles of human body proportions that Vitruvius developed in the first chapter of Book III, titled On Symmetry: In Temples And In The Human Body. It is one of Leonardo's best-known works.
The first printed edition was published by the Veronese scholar Fra Giovanni Sulpitius in 1486, with a second edition in 1495 or 1496, but neither was illustrated. The Dominican friar Fra Giovanni Giocondo produced the first illustrated edition, with woodcuts, in Venice in 1511.